DISH's mysterious wireless plans

Look out, LightSquared. There’s a new maverick in the wireless industry — at least if DISH Network's recently announced plans to build a state-of-the-art nationwide wireless network are to be believed.

If the company follows through, it could bring more competition to the industry and help meet the skyrocketing demand for mobile broadband. But DISH’s endgame is anything but clear, and how it will proceed is raising a web of political and policy questions for both industry players and the FCC.

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Like LightSquared, DISH Network has amassed an impressive swath of satellite spectrum it would like to leverage for land-based transmissions.

DISH, it said in a filing with the FCC last week, wants to “deploy the most advanced wireless broadband service using the LTE Advanced standard."

The satellite TV firm requested permission to combine its $1.375 billion bid for TerreStar with an earlier $1 billion purchase of DBSD North America. That, and a host of alterations to its spectrum requirements, would allow DISH to emerge as a major player in the wireless space, the company claims.

“We’re doing exactly what FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and what President Obama wants: Get spectrum used that is currently going unused,” a DISH executive said.

But the expense and risks associated with building a broadband network has some industry insiders skeptical that’s the company’s actual goal.

“DISH’s aggressive spectrum acquisition strategy may have nothing to do with operational ambitions, but rather a clever transactional play,” Jeff Silva, a telecommunications analyst with Medley Global Advisors, wrote in a note to clients. “Selling a DISH Network whose value is significantly bolstered by the addition of valuable spectrum assets would be one way to avoid such risks.”

Silva isn’t alone in that assessment.

“It doesn’t appear that he is very anxious to build a real national network,” one telecommunications lawyer said of Charles Ergen, DISH’s former CEO and current chairman. “It has all the hallmarks of a spectrum play: You go and get spectrum under one set of rules, you get the rules changed, and then you flip it.”

The company’s core competency, after all, is pay TV. When asked about the possibility of a spectrum flip, DISH declined to comment and pointed to its FCC filing.

In defense of DISH’s intentions, the company does propose meeting some build-out requirements in order to get approval of its transaction. If the FCC approves the transaction and license modification requests, DISH says it will work with the agency to create a build-out schedule consistent with principles “established in the Sprint/Nextel and Sprint/Clearwire transaction decisions.”